Curated Internet Searches & Other Resources
Library of Congress
Library of Congress collections contain over 162 million books, periodicals, manuscripts, maps, music, recordings, images, and electronic resources. The LC Catalog contains 17 million records describing these collections. You can search Catalog records by keyword or browse by authors/creators, subjects, names/titles, series/uniform titles, and call numbers.
Digital Public Library of America
DPLA connects people to the riches held within America’s libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. All of the materials found through DPLA—photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and so much more—are free and immediately available in digital format.
Semantic Scholar
Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered search and discovery tool that helps researchers discover and understand scientific literature that's most relevant to their work.
Semantic Scholar uses machine learning techniques to extract meaning and identify connections from within papers, then surfaces these insights to help scholars gain an in-depth understanding quickly.
RefSeek
RefSeek is a web search engine for students and researchers that aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone. RefSeek searches more than five billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers.
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RefSeek's unique approach offers students comprehensive subject coverage without the information overload of a general search engine—increasing the visibility of academic information and compelling ideas that are often lost in a muddle of sponsored links and commercial results.
The National Archives and Records Administration
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation's record keeper. Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States Federal government, only 1%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever.
Those valuable records are preserved and are available to you, whether you want to see if they contain clues about your family’s history, need to prove a veteran’s military service, or are researching an historical topic that interests you.
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In particular, the 100 Milestone Documents is an electronic version of the most important documents in American History. You can explore, print, or save these documents in pdf format. The documents reflect America’s diversity and unity, America’s past and future, and mostly America’s commitment as a nation to continue to strive to "form a more perfect union."
The Museum of Online Museums
If you need access to art images and information from around the world, the Museum of Online Museums houses online exhibits from museums around the world. They not only have current exhibitions but also archived exhibitions from museums like The Met and The Musee d’Orsay.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum inspires us to confront hatred, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity. The website is the digital face of their brick and mortar building. Explore the online encyclopedia, search through useful teaching materials and lesson plans, as well as delve into reference services and so much more.
Google Books
Book Search works just like web search. Try a search on Google Books. If the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given us permission, you'll be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire text. If it's in the public domain, you're free to download a PDF copy.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
